Global Warming: The Imminent Crisis That Never Arrives

It's summer 2017 and the Arctic was supposed to be ice-free, hurricanes were going to be more frequent and more deadly, and sea levels should be rising alarmingly. Al Gore swore in his 2006 science fiction movie, "An Inconvenient Truth," that within a decade there would be a "true planetary emergency."

"Unless we act boldly and quickly to deal with the underlying causes of global warming, our world will undergo a string of terrible catastrophes," said Gore in the movie's introduction.

The grand storyteller also predicted in 2011 that "there will be no more snows" on Mt. Kilimanjaro "within the decade."

Four years earlier, the Guardian of Britain reported that the United Nations was warning that we had "as little as eight years left to avoid a dangerous global average rise of 2C or more." Three years and more than 1,000 days ago, then French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius — a socialist, of course — advised us that "we have 500 days to avoid climate chaos."

We could go on. But we have neither the space nor time to rack up all the missed global warming predictions. So we will merely point out that instead of these disasters, we have the climate alarmist community admitting that there has indeed been a pause in the warming and that its models failed to predict it.

Yes, that's right. The alarmists are acknowledging in the abstract of a research paper that was published this month in Nature Geoscience that there have been "differences in model and satellite tropospheric warming rates."

"In the early twenty-first century, satellite-derived tropospheric warming trends were generally smaller than trends estimated from a large multi-model ensemble," wrote the climate scientists led by "climatista" Benjamin Santer and including the litigious Michael Mann, purveyor of the hockey-stick graph that supposedly proves human-produced carbon dioxide is overheating the planet.

"It's more than a little shocking," say Michael Bastasch and Ryan Maue in their post in the Watts Up With That climate blog. They are calling this admission "the new 'consensus' on global warming."

What must be particularly galling is that this confession "settles" the claim made by Trump Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt, who noted in written comments after his Senate confirmation that "over the past two decades satellite data indicates there has been a leveling off of warming."

Naturally, when Pruitt made his statements, condemnation "was swift," David Whitehouse, science editor of the Global Warming Policy Foundation, wrote in Canada's Financial Post, and "a study was quickly put together for the journal Nature Scientific Reports to disprove Pruitt's comments."

And, of course, the study "concluded that Pruitt was wrong and many media outlets reported that conclusion." Will they be just as aggressive in reporting that Pruitt was right?

Not a chance.

Meanwhile, Steven Hayward at Powerline wrote that "while it is evident that the authors have done all the necessary contortions that essentially say 'our models are just a little off' so as to convey a 'nothing to see here' conclusion, the abstract can hardly be reassuring because it has to concede the problem."

As Leslie Eastman of the Legal Insurrection blog noted, "the fact that Ben Santer authored this piece is a fascinating development."

"He is a climate researcher at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and former researcher at the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit. His former place of employment was the center of the first 'Climategate' scandal, in which hacked emails showed that the scientists were allegedly manipulating data that would have undermined their global warming assertions," Eastman wrote.

On some level the admission is shocking, as Bastasch and Maue say. Yet we've long known that at some point the confession had to be made. The alarmists couldn't carry on the charade forever.

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